Scoble's New Thing: Building 43
A week ago we reported that blogger Robert Scoble is leaving his current job running FastCompany TV. Now he's going to start talking about his new project - a new content and social networking community called Building 43, which he's building in partnership with his new employer, Rackspace.
Context & Ripple Effects
Scoble has made a career out of high-visibility employer moves, each one a referendum on where influence lives online. His departure from Microsoft in 2006 turned a corporate blogger into an independent brand (his Microsoft resignation was front-page news), followed by the jump from PodTech to Fast Company, where he built an online video network around his personal following (launched in early 2008). Building 43 is the next iteration: this time the destination isn't a media company but Rackspace, an infrastructure provider buying audience credibility rather than selling it.
First-order effects
- FastCompany TV loses its marquee talent and its core draw just over a year after Scoble launched its video operation, while Rackspace gains a well-known content personality to anchor a new community site.
- Building 43 gives Rackspace a direct content-and-social channel to developers and startups — the exact customers a hosting company competes on — without going through traditional tech media.
Second-order effects
- Other infrastructure and enterprise players face pressure to answer with their own sponsored communities and personalities, treating blogger hires as customer-acquisition spend rather than marketing.
- Independent tech media outfits like Fast Company must reckon with the fact that individual brands can be hired away wholesale, making personality-driven properties structurally fragile.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the line between media companies and the companies they cover keeps blurring: vendors become publishers, and attention becomes something acquired through employment contracts — raising disclosure questions Scoble himself has wrestled with before.
- The long-term shift is toward owned-audience strategies, where corporations buy not ad space but trusted voices, reshaping how technical audiences get information about the industry.
The trend: Corporations increasingly acquire individual media brands outright, turning influential bloggers into in-house publishing arms as vendor-built communities displace independent tech coverage.